


Four Tuuri's and one Marie

by orphan_account



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Four Tuuris, Next Generation, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 03:51:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11394777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “Lalli, did you think about it?”Lalli puts a fresh stack of dishes into the sink “Think about what?”“About the ramifications of letting first mom name a son Tuuri and then naming a kid Tuuri yourself and then letting Mikkel do it too? I mean, didn’t you think it might turn out a little bit problematic?”Lalli fixes his nephew with a cool, contemplative stare “I rarely think before I act. It gives me social vertigo.”





	Four Tuuri's and one Marie

**Author's Note:**

> Well, that update was beyond devastating, beyond my wildest imagination of how devastating anything could actually be and I want to do nothing but lay under my bed and cry. But instead I churned out a feverish, grief-fuelled fic about the crew in some twenty years after their mission and how they chose to remember Tuuri.
> 
> By making more Tuuri's. Everyone is named Tuuri.

“I’ll stop being mad about it when you admit you didn’t think it through.”

Sigrun Eide grins at her son “Then I guess you’re going to have to stay mad.” 

Her son, whose name is Tuuri, fixes her with a glower which he unquestionably inherited from her, and buries his arms in the soapy water up to the elbows, grumbling at the dishes. They are in Mikkel’s expansive kitchen, making a dent in the pile of dishes the recently finished dinner caused. Sigrun actually fought Mikkel away from the sink with a broom she found in the closet, arguing it was not the host’s job to clean up after his guests.

“Especially ones as piggish and revolting as these.” she had said in a stage-whisper, with a significant gesture at Emil and his daughters.

“’S’cuse me.” Lalli squeezes in between them, innocent of Tuuri’s bad mood.

He is confronted almost immediately.

“Lalli, did you think about it?”

Lalli puts a fresh stack of dishes into the sink “Think about what?”

“About the ramifications of letting first mom name a son Tuuri and then naming a kid Tuuri yourself and then letting Mikkel do it too? I mean, didn’t you think it might turn out a little bit problematic?”

Lalli fixes his nephew with a cool, contemplative stare “I rarely think before I act. It gives me social vertigo.”

“That’s not even a thing!”

“Yes it is. Don’t be an albeist.”

“I’m not being ab- you’re making stuff up! You know you are, too, because if your Swedish is good enough to recite Hamlet it’s good enough to know when you’re making up a term-”

Sigrun elbows her son sharply in the side “Hey! Show your uncle some respect. Lalli can make up whatever terms he wants to shut your sass-mouth.”

Knowing he has been defeated, Tuuri turns his sullen stare to the dish-water again and busies himself in washing the dishes with such ferocity that foam starts to fleck the window. Meanwhile, he sister is totally absorbed in the story Emil is telling in the dining room. Most of them are still sitting around the room working on the bitter coffees Reynir brewed up for everyone. The younger kids still have not been dismissed from the table, so fidget and kick on seats or laps, awaiting their freedom.  
Asal-Marie is two years younger than Tuuri. She has learned to be smug about escaping the burden of the name by virtue of being the second-born, and does not begrudge her mother for sticking the middle name of a woman she has never met into the second half of her name. Asal-Marie often remarks she feels she knows Tuuri, because she has grown up hearing about her.  
Sigrun and the others agree it is the stories of Tuuri’s exploits that led Asal-Marie into skald training. By the time she is sixteen she will be fixing war machines on the front-lines of Cleansing efforts. It is a special terror of Sigrun’s to imagine her baby girl hunkered over a smoking engine in the burning suburbs of Helsinki, but Emil has promised it will be finished before Asal-Marie is ready to be assigned- in fact, he promised he will finish it up especially for Sigrun and his oldest niece. A tall order, but the way things are going down there Emil might have it finished in time to open up that new front in Bergen everybody has been obsessing over for the last decade.

“…understood that this would be the hour that decided who was going to claim the city. Morale is running high, then Lalli lights the whole damn powder keg. Lalli’s a strong mage, but the combined dead of a whole city screaming in his head took a bad toll on him. He’s spent the month and a half we where in Voss alternating between fighting like a maniac and sleeping his migraines off. At this point he’s been unconscious for a whole day. But now he comes out with five Valium in his hand, downs them in one gulp and goes ‘Let’s finish this before these pills wear off’, and everyone just started cheering.”

“Did he pass out?” asks Tuuri-Margaret eagerly from Mikkel’s lap.

“No, I didn’t pass out.” Lalli rejoins the group in the dining room “I fought off most of the ghosts in Voss with the rest of the mages.”

“Then did you pass out?”

“Yes, Tuuri-Margaret, then I passed out.”

Tuuri-Margaret giggles. In her opinion, no story is complete unless Uncle Lalli passes out. She thinks it is the funniest thing in the world when someone is unconscious. Mikkel has privately told Emil he worries this is a sign of the same general disillusionment with the world and other people he remembers feeling when he was her age.

Reynir finishes laughing and wipes his eyes on the back of his hand “Am I hearing Sig and Tuuri in there right? Are they arguing about names again?”

Lalli takes his seat beside his husband, then accepts the restless eight-year-old Emil passes to him “Tuuri’s on a warpath right now.”

Making a sympathetic noise, Mikkel reaches across the table and retrieves the salt shaker from Tuuri-Margaret’s twin, Magnus, before he can dump it in his mouth “He always gets like that when we’re all together. I suppose it embarrasses him to have so many people sharing his name under one roof.”

Asal-Marie scoffs and glares towards the kitchen “He needs to get over it. Hel, he should be proud to be the first of the Tuuri’s.”

“I think he hates having a Finnish name.” remarks Reynir “Your school in Dalsnes is full of Arabic and Norwegian and Chinese names. He’s weird to have a Finnish name. I bet he’s the only Tuuri in Dalsnes. The best Tuuri, at least, if there is another one there.”

“Until I come.” mumbles the eight-year-old darkly, cracking the adults up.  
This is the Hotakainens’ Tuuri. In spite of what Tuuri Eide thinks of Lalli’s decision making skills, he at least held off on naming his and Emil’s first daughter after his cousin.  
Their daughter arrived in that horrible spring they had reason to believe Sigrun was dead and eaten in a splinter of the Silent World off the coast of Sweden, so she was named Sigrun in honour of the woman they believed they had just lost. Of course, two months later, Sigrun Eide rocked up to the Swedish mainland in a bearskin, carrying a spear and the remnants of a cannon. She strode into Dalsnes and announced her survival by kicking the gate of Dalsnes open and shouting “Where’s my widower and orphans at?”

The second daughter afforded the Hotakainens a chance to correct their mistake, and she was christened Tuuri Ensi Hotakainen.  
At the moment it looks very much like eight-year-old Tuuri will be a mage-scout like Lalli. She has an intense interest in the woods, demonstrated by the amount of weird and muddy stuff she drags in from it and plunks on the kitchen table to show to her fathers. Sigrun, on the other hand, has apparently been cursed by her namesake to serve the military; she will be moving to the training camp in Dalsnes by the summer of her thirteenth birthday, and the older Sigrun has promised she will shape her into a Viking berserker machine, as she maintains she did with Emil. Both of them, of course, also have a penchant for burning things, because they are Emil’s daughters and find the all-consuming power of flame against troll flesh mesmerising.

“I like my name.” says Tuuri-Margaret “It’s fun to be the only Tuuri. Then I get to be a part of a bunch of Tuuri’s. We’re like a club. Or an army.”

Mikkel shudders visibly “Let’s stick with club, honey. I don’t even want to think about what you kids are going to be capable of when you’re all trained-up and even more dangerous than you already are.”

“We’re gonna set the world on fire.” promises Sigrun Hotakainen.  
Emil ruffles her fluffy blonde hair, his face nervous. Two days before they set out for Bornholm, he caught her standing over a freshly dug fire-pit in the backyard with a can of oil in one hand and a gigantic, medieval-looking torch in the other. He sneaked up on her and dumped a bucket of water over her, the torch and the little flames starting up in the firepit, then left her there to think about what she had done, and to tell Lalli in a panicked undertone that she was at it again. Lalli was not all that perturbed, being of the opinion that: “They’re your daughters when they’re burning shit.”

Suddenly Tuuri Eide stalks out of the kitchen. He tosses himself into his chair and sighs dramatically. Beside him, Reynir makes a pouty face and pats his arm.

“The world got you down, son?” he coos.

“Don’t patronise me, Braidy.”

“Respect your uncle!” barks Sigrun from the kitchen.

“None of you think before you act.” he mumbles “You’ve all got social vertigo.”

Mikkel frowns “What is that? Did you just make that up?”

Ignoring the warning look his sister fixes him with, Tuuri lets out a long-suffering sigh “The impossible burden you saddled us with when you named us Tuuri! How can any of us ever live up to her legacy?”

“Try shaving your head.” says Lalli.

Emil swats his arm, trying not to laugh “Lalli! Not appropriate!”

Reynir flaps a hand for silence “Wait, wait, I’m interested. What legacy? The skald part? Because Asal-Marie is a good skald. I mean, I’ve never seen anyone tame a cranky engine the way your Aunt Tuuri could except for Asal-Marie.”

“This is true!” calls Sigrun.

She glows with pride “Thanks Uncle Reynir.”

This just makes Tuuri Eide angrier. He looks around for inspiration, then points at eight-year-old Tuuri in her father’s lap “What about her? She’s only eight. But she’s already thinking about how there’s an amazing woman she has to live up to. It’s bad enough she’s the daughter of two living legends, but named after a dead legend too?”

Tuuri Hotakainen digests this comment for a moment “Stop projecting your insecurities onto me.”

The adults fall about. Emil only just saves himself from falling sideways out of his chair, and Sigrun has to wheeze her way into the room to give Tuuri Hotakainen a soapy high-five. Even Magnus, who normally stays silent and glares at everyone, busts out laughing. Tuuri Eide’s face is the perfect picture of rage and embarrassment. He opens his mouth several times, closes it, and eventually falls silent as his mother pats him on the shoulder, and kisses him on the top of the head.

“You’ll be your own legend one day.” she says.

“The legend of the man who was burned to death by an eight-year-old.” rasps Mikkel, fanning himself.

“Oh!” Reynir’s face lights up “I forgot to tell you all! We got the test results the day before I left! The baby is going to be a girl!”

Reynir is roundly congratulated and slapped on the back. Sigrun Hotakainen rushes over to give him a hug and asks to be the baby’s godmother, which she has been doing every single time she has seen Reynir since learning his girlfriend was pregnant. 

“And I finally convinced her,” he adds when the excitement has died down “Tuuri is a good name. It doesn’t matter all of my best friends already have Tuuri’s.”

“Dam straight it doesn’t. It’s a tradition. Every generation has to have a Tuuri.” Sigrun squeezes her son’s shoulder “Tuuri, you and your sister have my blessing to do anything you want with your lives, but I will absolutely disown you both if I don’t get a grandkid named Tuuri.”

He mutters something foul under his breath.

“Sure Mom,” says Asal-Marie brightly “I really like the name Tuuri-Marie, actually, so I was thinking maybe that one for a girl. Or a boy. There’s a boy in my training who’s name is Marie and I really like it for a boy ever since I met him.”

Emil exchanges a glance with Lalli “Marie? Never heard that one for a boy. We always figured if we had a son, we would call him Ville.”

“Wasn’t that the name of your childhood dog?” 

Lalli is nonplussed “Shut up Mikkel.”

“Maybe.” 

All eyes turn on Tuuri Eide. He colours and crosses his arms “I mean, maybe. Maybe Tuuri will suit one of my kids better. Assuming I have kids.”

Sigrun smiles at him and pats his arm “That’d be nice.”

“I’m just sorry none of you will ever get to meet her.” Emil glances at his older daughter with a bitter smile “You’re so lucky to know your aunt Sigrun. I’m so glad she found a way to come back to us.”

“Me too.” she reaches for her father’s hand and squeezes it.

“Bet the bear wasn’t.” says Magnus.

They are all laughing again. Tuuri Hotakainen, with her delicate mage’s senses, suddenly realises there are more people laughing at the moment then there are in the room. She can only hear it for a moment. A quick, soft chuckle in her ear, which sounds like Lalli’s but is definitely lighter and happier, as if some twenty years of pain and suffering were removed from it. Tuuri strains and commits it to memory as best she can. Somehow, she knows she has just heard what it sounded like when the first of them, the Tuuri that stole herself away from the Rash years ago, laughed.


End file.
